altruistic channels through
sublimation. Since the woman of his class will not marry him until he
has money, the young man too often satisfies his undirected instincts
in a commercial way. The statistics of venereal diseases prove that
here, as elsewhere, goods subject to barter are subject to
contamination. In a late marriage, too often a contaminated body
accompanies the material possessions which the standards of society
have demanded of a husband.

But the woman pays in still other coin for the repressions arising
from faulty childhood training. Unable to find expression for herself
either in marriage or in devotion to work, because some old childish
repression is still denying all outlet to her legitimate desire, she
frequently falls into a neurosis; or if she escapes a real breakdown,
she gives expression to unsatisfied longings in some isolated nervous
symptoms which in many cases center about the organs of generation.
There then results any one of the various functional disturbances
which are only too often mistaken for organic disease. What is needed
in cases like this is not a gynecologist nor a surgeon, but a
psycho-pathologist--or perhaps only a grasp of the facts. Let us look
at the more common of these disturbances in order to gain an
understanding of the situation.

THE MENSTRUAL PERIOD

=Potential Motherhood.= Among the normal phenomena of a woman's life
is the recurring cycle of potential motherhood. Every three or four
weeks a new ovum or egg matures in the ovary and undergoes certain
chemical changes, which send into the blood a substance called a
hormone. This hormone is a messenger, stimulating the mucous membrane
of the womb into making its velvet pile longer and softer, and its
nutrient juices more abundant in readiness for the ovum.

The same stimulus causes the whole organism to make ready for a new
life. As in hunger, the chemistry of the body produces the
muscle-tension that is felt as a craving for food, so this recurring
chemical stimulus produces a definite craving in body and mind. This
craving brings about an increased irritability or sensitiveness to
stimuli which may result either in a joyous or a fretful mood.

During sleep the social inhibitions are felt less distinctly and the
sleeper dreams love-dreams woven from messages coming up from all the
minute nerve-endings in the expectant reproductive organs. But if no
germ-cell travels up the womb-canal and tube to meet and impreg